Processing stations and framing stations are known and serve, for example, to clamp vehicle body parts in a predetermined accurate position and subsequently by a joining procedure ultimately to connect together said vehicle body parts. The joining procedure may be welding, adhesive bonding, riveting or even crimping. For the procedure of accurately positioning one body component, for example a side wall, to another body component, for example a floor assembly, so-called clamping frames are used. One or more of these clamping frames are held and/or stored in a magazine area and displaced and/or transported into the working area and back again by a feed device. A clamping frame is generally configured as an upright, substantially planar supporting frame on which a plurality of actuatable tensioners are held, the body parts being clamped together thereby at predetermined points in order to be joined there. A clamping frame is not configured per se to carry and to transport a body part, but merely to move a body component which has been prepositioned by means of a fish plate joint or even clipped to a second body component in a previous mounting step into a final structurally predetermined position.
A processing station is disclosed in DE 10 2012 009 061 A1 in which the clamping frame may be displaced via two transport systems on a suspended rail arrangement between a magazine area and a working area.
Suspended rail arrangements are not optimal at least when workpieces, for example welding systems and/or welding robots, have to be fed from above the working area as required.
EP 1 686 048 A2 discloses a processing station in which the clamping frames are displaced on a floor-based rail arrangement between a magazine area and working area.
In principle, the arrangement of the drive by which the feed device is driven causes difficulties in such arrangements. Thus there is the possibility of providing each clamping frame with a drive. This is complex and expensive. Moreover, there is the possibility of arranging a drive in the region of the rail arrangement of the feed device, wherein this nevertheless results in the requirement of having to transmit the drive power to the clamping frame to be displaced, if the need arises.
Thus a need exists for a processing station, where the feed device, a floor-based rail arrangement, and the drive are configured to displace the clamping frames in a space-saving and structurally simple manner.